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At the 2025 Future Proof Festival, Communify’s EVP of Business Development, Sarah Chubak, mapped out a vision for the advisor-client relationship that merges human empathy with breakthrough technology. For wealth managers and financial advisors navigating retention risks and client engagement challenges, Communify’s model and direction are worth close attention.
Bringing Precise Insights—and Real Value
Communify’s core promise is “to provide precise insights and add massive value to investors, clients, and investment professionals,” as Chubak explained at the outset. “We are a financial AI, digital and data solutions company, and our mission is actually quite simple. It's to provide precise insights and add massive value to investors, clients, and investment professionals. And we do that by unifying the communication of market and client data through what we call our mature knowledge bases, our AI tools, our digital apps, and our chat and stories. There's a lot there to unpack. But that's our mission.”
From wirehouse giants like Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, where Communify is “a piece of the puzzle,” to RIAs seeking a single advisor desktop, the company adapts to each firm’s business model. “In the RIA space, we tend to be the advisor’s desktop—the advisor’s…central hub of where they live and breathe, and then have the client experience on the flip side,” said Chubak.
Solving the Retention and Efficiency Challenge
The rising challenge for the industry, Chubak noted, is client retention amid massive generational and demographic shifts. “There’s a massive retention problem that’s gonna be coming up with generational wealth transfer, horizontal wealth transfer to women, and having empathetic experiences for clients, for advisors to be able to communicate with their clients is really important. And I think now more than ever, with all of this money moving,” she explained.
The other—no less urgent—priority is efficiency. “Everyone's talking about AI, so it’s ripe for ‘How do we make advisors more efficient? How do we scale the advisor as the generation of advisors are retiring or…just less advisors?’” Communify’s vision is about helping advisors grow and “ultimately be more efficient using tools like AI, but completely integrating that AI into the data that we have and using all of our datasets, our knowledge bases, to actually create that cohesive story.”
Data-Driven Design Meets Behavioral Science
Communify’s foundation is high-quality, integrated data. “On the data side of things, we're preintegrated into over 4,000 feeds daily. So we have over 175 providers, and that's including custodian systems, accounting systems, planning systems, as well as all the market data, reference data, news content, and research. So we bring all that in, and we bring it into what we call knowledge bases, so trusted data sets, because without the data, the experience kind of doesn't matter.”
Layers of digital experience sit atop this trusted data. “One of my favorite things about our business is we have a team of about 36 designers and UX specialists who are solely focused on the financial services space and they design really highly empathetic experiences, all backed by behavioral science, across industries—not just financial services—generally, how do you drive engagement? How do you keep eyes on the page? And once they’re there, how do you get clients to do what you want them to do?”
“On top of that,” Chubak added, “we have AI, and one of the things that we do…is compliance-approved personalization at scale, which is really kind of the name of the game.”
Empathy in Practice: The NFL Athlete RIA Case
For RIAs and niche client bases, Communify delivers highly tailored and branded apps. Chubak described a “favorite client” in Florida: “They have a very niche client base, so their clients are all athletes, particularly NFL players. And so they had a very unique need to communicate in a very empathetic way to their clients. They weren't really able to do so with the technology that was out there. The clients, frankly, didn't understand what they put forward or it was information overload or whatever the issue was.”
Communify gave them a configured mobile experience: “For them, they don't really want to know as much about investments. They're really focused on insurance. What happens if I break my leg…how much cash do I have if I want to buy this new car…having an experience that led with the questions that clients cared about has driven massive engagement, as well as news content. It's really become the hub for their clients that puts them at the center of their clients’ financial life.”
On the advisor side, the impact was equally dramatic: “They have everything in one place—planning data, custodial data, investments, as well as their private assets, their insurance, everything is coming into that one repository. So the advisor only has to go to one place, and then using AI for intelligent insights on top of that—so which clients do I need to be talking to today, for whatever the reason is.”
Balancing Technology with Human Advice
Chubak believes that “human-centered digital advice is so important.” Communify’s approach is intentional about keeping the advisor central: “Of course, you don't want to disenfranchise the advisor, and…the technology, all technology, especially AI, is meant to be accretive to the advisor, really help the advisor grow, help the advisor retain their clients, and that's really what we do.”
A highlight of Communify’s offering is “Client Stories.” Chubak explained: “It’s a way to personalize a narrative around an individual client…A series of questions and answers that are driven by the firm—of here are the ways that you should be thinking about your client, and it’s crafted into a nice, beautiful narrative…The advisor has their own narrative. They can control it. They can update the questions, control what the client sees. They have full control, so the advisor still can be at the center, but [Stories] are massively…accelerating their time to do meetings.”
Stories, Compliance, and the Future
Stories, Chubak contends, are the future: “We’re working with a firm that has about a 90-page PDF of how they communicate client reviews today. I mean, in fairness, 30 pages of it are disclosures, but…it’s crazy…These are top-tier firms, and that’s what they've done for the past 50 years. So the story: we're working with them to create this story…Let’s make it personal, take people through a narrative, a set of questions and answers they can understand.”
And even the most change-averse firms are embracing digital transformation—carefully. “The nice thing about stories is it can be personalized to the end client or the advisor can personalize it so you can really get that scale. The stories are built on deterministic AI—compliance sees all the outcomes beforehand, so you know what you’re giving your client is sound,” Chubak explained. “That's the scary part of using a lot of these tools, but we take that fear away.”
As wealth management continues to evolve, Chubak summed up Communify’s value for advisors: “People know they want AI, and they want to make the change. We give them a way to do both—safely.”
To learn more about Communify, visit their website here.
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